I preordered Anthem back in December because the E3 footage looked incredible and I have a weak spot for BioWare going back to the original Mass Effect trilogy. It went full release last Friday, the 22nd, after a week of early access for anyone with Origin Access Premier, and I've now put in enough hours over the weekend to have Opinions, capital O.
The flying feels great. I want to say that up front because it's the one thing nobody's arguing about. You strap into a Javelin, one of four mech-suit classes, and the traversal is genuinely some of the best BioWare has ever shipped. Diving into water to cool your thrusters, popping back out into a boost, weaving through canyon walls, that part of the game is a joy and I don't think it's getting enough credit this week.
Everything around the flying is where it falls apart, though.
The loading screens. I cannot overstate how much time I've spent staring at a spinning icon. You finish a mission, you get dumped back to your Javelin bay, you walk (walk!) through your bay to a loading elevator, you load into Fort Tarsis, you walk through Fort Tarsis at human jogging speed to talk to an NPC who has three lines of dialogue, and then you load back out again. On my rig this is anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds a pop, multiple times an hour. It's not a deal-breaker on its own but it stacks up into real, wasted time, and it's baffling that a studio this experienced shipped a hub area that's this much of a chore just to walk across.
The loot. This is the one that actually worries me for the game long-term. I finished my first Grandmaster difficulty stronghold Saturday night, the kind of run that's supposed to be the whole point of a loot shooter, and got two masterwork items I already had a better version of and a pile of crafting materials I don't need yet because the crafting system itself feels half-finished. People smarter than me at spreadsheets have already started posting drop-rate breakdowns, and the numbers being thrown around aren't good. BioWare kept telling everyone before launch not to compare Anthem to Destiny. I get why they said that. I also think it's a losing battle, because that's exactly the shelf this game is sitting on, and Destiny 2 (even with its own rocky launch two years back) had figured out itemization better than this by the time it shipped.
The crashes. This is the one I didn't expect. There've been a bunch of reports floating around this week, including some PS4 owners saying the game outright crashed or froze their console, not just the software. EA's put out a statement saying they're looking into it with Sony. I play on Xbox and PC and haven't had anything that dramatic happen to me, just the standard hard crash back to dashboard maybe once every few hours, which honestly at this point barely registers as news for a big always-online launch. But if you're on PS4 and haven't patched your firmware in a while, this might be a week to double check that before you dive in.
None of this is really surprising if you followed the beta weekends back in January, where most of these exact complaints were already being made loudly on Reddit and nothing structural seems to have changed since. I don't think Anthem is a bad game so much as an unfinished one that got pushed out the door on a release date that had already been public for months. There's supposedly a big "Cataclysm" event and a proper endgame content roadmap coming later this year, and I'll probably check back in when that lands, because the flying really is good enough that I want this to work.
For now though my honest recommendation is: wait. Let the itemization pass happen, let them patch the loading, then come back. I say this as someone who already paid full price and is a little annoyed about it.